Buell Kazee was playing banjo in church at age five in Magoffin County, Kentucky, majored in English, Greek, and Latin at Georgetown College, and then recorded 51 tracks for Brunswick Records in New York between 1927 and 1929, including "Roll On John," "John Hardy," "The Sporting Bachelors," "Little Orphan Child," and his biggest success, "On Top of Old Smoky." This episode looks at how the electrical microphone made his quiet banjo-and-voice sound recordable, and how classical training taught him to hear mountain ballads as ancient narrative structures.

When record sales collapsed by over 90 percent by 1932, Kazee left the industry for what had been his teenage ambition, serving 22 years as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Morehead, Kentucky. The Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled in the early 1950s, put his 1920s recordings i ...